CXIV is a scheme-like language. I am building it primarily for educational purposes. Later it may become a test bed for ideas that I have about PL design (if I get that far).

Warning: this language is, for the forseeable future, in a permanent alpha release state. I make no guarantees as to the accuracy of this section, although I will try to keep it up to date.

There are a few kinds of primitives accepted by CXIV. Primitives generally evaluate to themselves.

Ex: -1, 123, 42...

These are represented internally as signed 64-bit doubles. There is no integer type--this is similar to javascript and lua. I suppose one could recompile it with 32/64-bit integers, but it is not officially supported.

Ex: #t, #f.

These are the primitive true and false values. They are returned by comparison operations.

Ex: #\a, #\Z, #\newline

Any representable ASCII character may be preceded by a hash and forward slash (#\) and it will be interpreted as a character. Non-representable characters (like newline, space, etc.) may be represented by their name preceded by the same prefix.

Only space and newline are supported at this time.

Ex: "hello world"

Any double quote not preceded by the character prefix (#\) will be interpreted as the beginning of a string, up until the next double quote.

Ex: ()

Special singleton object to represent an empty list/nil value. Has a "falsey" value.

Ex: (2 3 4), (2 . 5)

A pair is a set of two elements joined in a specific order. Pairs are created using the infix 'dot' operator. An proper pair is one where the second element is either () (nil) or a proper pair itself. For example, a proper pair could be (5 . ()), or it could be (2 . (3 . (4 . ()))). An improper pair is where this is not true (i.e. (2 . 5)).

Ex: {'hello "world"}, {'a 'alex 'b 'ben}

A map is an associative structure with key-value pairs. These maps are implemented using a hash table. Maps follow a one to one correspondence. That is to say, they don't allow the same key to appear twice in the table. Only the latest value update will remain.